NYC

My recent museum and bookstore immersion in New York City . . .

Poet’s House, a dream come true, a 20-year-old library started by Stanley Kunitz and someone else, 45,000 volumes, every poet's books, literary journals, commentary and biography. Library ladders and high windows. A place to sit, browse, read, write. Friendly, free.

Metropolitan Museum, I went twice, the second time with an ex-Met guard, who ran me through gallery after gallery, "here," she'd say, and "here." The Lehman wing with a huge Balthus of a naked barely pubescent girl. The Egyptian temple. A yellow jasper fragment of an Egyptian head, mostly chin and sharply incised lips.

MOMA, newly open after the Yoshio Taniguchi renovation. We arrived early and with memberships were able to move through it before the crowds overwhelmed. The traditional moderns -- Pollock, Rauschenberg, Giacometti, Rothko, Chirico, Mondrian, Picasso, Miro, Diebenkorn, so many in all their hugeness. I had forgotten how I love Miro.

Guggenheim: an Aztec exhibit, large mythical rock creatures beautifully staged in dark brown caves.

Whitney: Noguchi sculptures I needed to (but didn't) touch (go here and here, settled for moving air around with my hands, and Romare Bearden paintings, collages. Go here and here.

I am so drenched in color and form. I wanted to stay everywhere, sit on the floor and try some verbal transformations, or remain wordless.

Bookstores -- Gotham Book Mart, St. Mark's Bookstore, an uptown Barnes & Noble with more poetry books than my library. My book bag is full.

Amtraked down to DC, ate Brazilian paella, squatting in a dark hotel room this morning. Soon we board a second long slow train to Charlotte, NC. I love trains, the prescribed meander, the sway and rattle.